Fast multipole boundary element method for the acoustic analysis of finite periodic structures

In this work, two fast multipole boundary element formulations for the linear time-harmonic acoustic analysis of finite periodic structures are presented. Finite periodic structures consist of a bounded number of unit cell replications in one or more directions of periodicity. Such structures can be designed to efficiently control and manipulate sound waves and are referred to as acoustic metamaterials or sonic crystals. Our methods subdivide the geometry into boxes which correspond to the unit cell. A boundary element discretization is applied and interactions between well separated boxes are approximated by a fast multipole expansion. Due to the periodicity of the underlying geometry, certain operators of the expansion become block Toeplitz matrices. This allows to express matrix–vector products as circular convolutions which significantly reduces the computational effort and the overall memory requirements. The efficiency of the presented techniques is shown based on an acoustic scattering problem. In addition, a study on the design of sound barriers is presented where the performance of a wall-like sound barrier is compared to the performance of two sonic crystal sound barriers. •Fast multipole boundary element method for acoustic problems with periodic geometry.•Periodicity of the boundary conditions, incident fields and solution is not required.•Fast multipole operators are represented by multilevel block Toeplitz matrices.•Matrix-vector products and memory usage scale quasi-linear with the number of dofs.•Design study of two sonic crystal sound barriers in a 3d half-space is presented.